Anil's Ghost

Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: Although I was blown away by "The English Patient," I feel that "Anil's Ghost" is more cohesive and works better as a novel. Still, "Anil's Ghost" is not a straightforward and linear book, so it probably won't appeal to readers who like simpler, plot-oriented fare. Ondaatje is also a poet and has an amazing facility with language and emotional nuance. The book's structure is often associative rather than plot-driven, so it's as if the book was written as it was remembered or dreamed. Rather than any particular facts or events, his focus is on how those facts and events are remembered and perceived. I couldn't put this book down. Great work.

Rating:
Summary: Starts strong and falls apart
Review: Anil is an interesting woman, and for the majority of the book, we follow her journey back to a Sri Lankan home that's recognizable, yet in some ways shockingly alien. Anil is intropective, but surprisingly numb. She seems disassociated from herself and her feelings.

Suddenly, the book turns into a heavy handed political statement. Anil is lost as the author takes a cheap and route to make a rather banal point, which just kills any legitimate emotional involvement. It's as if the first part of the book is something literary and interesting, while the ending goes for the simple sell.

Do not waste your time reading this dissappointment.

Rating:
Summary: Ondaatje trumps The English Patient
Review: Crafted with complex characterizations, this is Michael Ondaatje's first novel since The English Patient fetched fame and Hollywood acclaim. Now living in Toronto, he again builds a labyrinthine plot around memorable characters that this time bestir our cranial amygdalas.

Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist from USA alights in Sri Lanka, formerly called Ceylon. Her mission from the States is to investigate alleged human rights violations.

Originally raised in Ceylon's culture, she procures her first name from her brother in return for favors that included a sexual one. She refuses to feminize her name to its female version Anile.

People killed in Sri Lanka's wars are not her concern. Tortures and murders are. Her reluctant Sri Lankan accomplice Sarath Diyasena cautions it is dangerous to spell out the truth concerning corpses in written reports to authorities. A dubious assistant, he will enact an off-center role in Anil's quest for justice.

So will two special skeletons. Through unique circumstances these can help Anil prove widespread cases of ethnic torture.

In 1993 forces assassinated Sri Lanka's President Premadasa who is thinly disguised in the novel. This book is less about politics than gross humanity.

To identify one skeleton they name Sailor, Anil and Sarath hire the somewhat unsavoury Ananda. His name is that of a disciple of Buddha's. Ananda's skill stems from ancient arts. He is to construct an image of Sailor's face -- but he has his own therapeutic agenda.

Ondaatje unfolds Anil's past life and romances in the States, while unveiling Sri Lanka's people, terrain and culture. It leads to a compelling climax as Anil prepares to convince her Sri Lanka peers of shocking truths.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Writing, Stark Subject Matter
Review: I didn't like the English Patient, I thought it was tiresome. In fact, I almost didn't read this book because of that.

Anil's Ghost on the other hand, has some of the most beautifully written prose I've ever read. Part One drew me in and made me ache that anyone could have such talent with the written word.

The book isn't told in a traditional way. It takes energy to follow it, there are a lot of leaps the reader must make, especially toward the end, to keep track of the characters and storyline, but it wasn't impossible and given the subject matter, it wasn't a surprise either.

In my opinion, the non linear way the story was told made it more like storytelling than a book and as such, I thought it a very clever way to approach the subject matter. Death squads are never easy to deal with, government sponsored murders, rebels kidnapping doctors, criminal shortages of medical supplies - these things are horrifying, so horrifying the first impulse is to look away. Instead Ondaatje tells us the story of loss and hopelessness through the lives of the characters, which enables us to hear it.

Humans are fallable, that people stand by and say nothing while great atrocities take place is not only cowardly, it's human nature. I think that to make the characters in this book three dimensional and real, Ondaatje crafted them with flaws. Anil's inability to connect, Sarath's government connections, Gamini's distaste for people in general - these are all ways of drawing the reader in. The goal isn't to make us like Anil or Sarath, it's to tell the story through them, through different perspectives.

Rating:
Summary: I Wish I Liked It More
Review: I'm not sure what to say about this book. I thought that the basic idea of it was very good. That's what pulled me in. But then...I don't know what happened. After the basic premise of the plot was introduced, it seemed like the author got tired of it. So he began another plot, and another. Most of these had something to do with the main story, but some of them I couldn't understand. And then at the end, all the loose ends were tied up, all the plots had climaxed, except for the main story with which the book had started in the first place. I wish I would have liked this book more, but it jumped around from plot to plot a lot and seemingly at random. I thought that the main plot-a forensic anthropoligist sent to her homeland to try to help solve a string of possible government murders-was excellent, and I loved Michael Ondaatje's poetic style. But that didn't seem to help the fact that I didn't understand what was going on half of the time. Maybe I just don't have enough background.

Rating:
Summary: Hard to digest...
Review: Just having finished reading "Anil's Ghost" I am still feeling oppressed by the images of the Sri Lankan civil war that are being evoked again and again throughout the book. Indeed, it may not be a far-fetched idea to interpret "Anil's Ghost" as a book written in order to denounce the atrocities of war, given the importance the author attaches to the subject by making it the book's recurring theme.

Actually, the story is quite multi-layered: The reader's attention gets focussed mainly on Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educated abroad, who is sent back to her home country by an international human rights group. Her job will be to work together with local officials in order to help them discover the perpetrators responsible for the large-scale killings that took place on the island. Once she has arrived in Colombo, Anil is instructed to team up with the archaeologist Sarath Diyasena, and their efforts to identify one particular skeleton take them on a trip across Sri Lanka and its most scenic - albeit now partly ravaged - spots.

As he did in "The English Patient", Mr Ondaatje in "Anil's Ghost", too, along the way introduces the reader to various subjects apparently disconnected from the main plot. Among the topics dwelt upon this time are archaeology, research techniques of forensic anthropology and Sri Lankan Buddhism. However, all these expositions are effectively dwarfed by the omnipresent descriptions of war and its horrible consequences. What's more, I found the main characters such as Anil or Sarath rather difficult to assess if not downright unapproachable. This is why I should call "Anil's Ghost" a powerful and compelling book, but one that is hard to digest and that I will probably never come to love.

Rating:
Summary: I wanted to like this book
Review: Like several of my fellow reviewers here, I really wanted and expected to like Anil's Ghost. I am attracted to elegant writing in general, and to author Michael Ondaatje's work in particular. And the setting -- amid the problems revolving around the Sri Lankan Tamal Tigers -- is something I know about only from newspaper headlines and have been eager to know about on a more personal level.

Unfortunately, although I found this book wonderfully written, it seemed to be about almost nothing, at least nothing I could recognize. Open its pages and read almost any paragraph and the images and word choice will enchant you. But without a more coherent story line and better character development, I'm not sure who could enjoy this.

I did make my way through the whole thing, but I found it slow, murky, depressing, ambiguous, and ultimately unsatisfying. The protagonist, forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera, is particularly puzzling in my mind: I read more than 300 pages dominated by her thoughts and fears and interactions and yet I still have no idea who she is.

Yes, the writing here is delecate and elegant. But one could say the same thing about most of Mr. Ondaatje's work. My suggestion is to pick another of his books, one that comes with a compelling story as well as the wonderful writing.

Rating:
Summary: Heartachingly Human
Review: Not sure which aspect to address about the book first: the inner landscapes of the characters, the anguish of the events described, or Ondaatje's uncanny skill in weaving words into beauty.

Each of Ondaatje's works explores an intuitive protagonist of great integrity who is placed in challenging circumstance. Perhaps it is the classic hero's journey. Perhaps these are characters who've reached the end of the journey and go beyond.

The setting for, _Anil's Ghost_ is civil war torn Sri Lanka. Anil, the protagonist, is sent in, as a forensic anthropologist for a human rights organization, to try and find some answers. Anil was born and raised in Sri Lanka, so this is also a return for her after many years away.

The book explores the insides of the characters, the way they interact with each other, and how they face the challenges of the unspeakably painful environment of domestic terrorism.

I sincerely recommend, _Anil's Ghost_ and any other book by stellar author Michael Ondaatje.

Rating:
Summary: The author goes missing
Review: Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost is a sensitive, lyrical,
and ultimately disturbing work. It is disturbing
since the reader is fooled into believing that the usual contract between
the author and reader will be the met: closure at the end.

The novel starts out with the vitality and dramatic promise of good
political murder mystery. The plot begins much like Cruz-Smith's Gorky Park,
where recent human remains are found that may be linked to a
state-sponsored murder. In fact, the plot parallels between Anil's Ghost and
Gorky Park are striking (although the writing styles are as different as
hot and cold). These parallels, while coincidental, are ultimately helpful in
understanding Ondaatje's work.

In each novel, a talented, withdrawn, totally uncorruptable forensic
investigator operates within a totalitarian state, trying to solve, at some
personal peril, a possible state-sponsored murder. Learning who the victim
was, his occupation, habits, locale, becomes the early focus. In each case the
investigator is assisted by a colleague who may or may not be in collusion with
the state. The investigator seeks out advise from an historian who
knows the country's past. The investigator takes the skull of the victim
and, in secret, has the face reconstructed. At every turn, the state machinery
works against the effort.

This is where the parallels end. While the Gorky Park detective, Arkady,
is working against specific evils, greed and megalomania, and where
confrontations are possible, Anil is swimming through an endless sea of evil.
The fact that the Sri Lankan landscape is infused with a gentle beauty and
a quiet ancient eastern spiritualism makes the creeping evil of the death
squads in the night, torture, and killings, even more stark. There are three
secret terror armies afoot: those of the illegal government,
the anti-government forces, and the separatists, who are all murdering
people with casual callousness.

In Gorky Park, when the truth is learned
- when the body is identified, the evidence amassed and the story known,
Arkady stuffs it all into an envelope and mails it to the
Chief Police Authority and then all he has to do is stay alive and
wait. But there is no such social moral authority
present in all of Sri Lanka for Anil. Anil surfaces,
is publicly humiliated, slapped-down, and ejected from the country, and this
was the good option; had she stayed, she would be killed.
She tried to surface, but the sea of evil is much too strong.

It is around this time that the author Ondaatje also begins to depart,
- leaving us remaining with only traces of the story. It has become
something now more like a Samuel Beckett play, where all the
characters are either vanished, dead, or left twisting in the wind,
and the very plot itself goes missing. I don't think this is
accidental. When it is explained how the person who as helped Anil escape
death is rewarded for his trouble, we cannot even tell if it is because he has
done too much, too little, or for some other reason altogether. Nor does it
seem to matter much, except, as the author explains,
that it helps to connect two estranged brothers.

Some closure comes when we learn that some of these characters do survive
(ironically, those most unbalanced). At the close, the character who we've
seen suffer some of the worst, experiences a moment of grace. Ondaatje
seems to be telling us that in times of such evil, this is maybe the very best
we should expect.

Rating:
Summary: Great background on Sri Lanka, poorly developed characters
Review: The story of a Western educated Sri-Lankan women who returns to her native land as a forensic anthropologist investigating murders of the skeletons she finds. I found it hard to truly relate to or care about the characters in this book. But it's an easy to read story and gave me some insight into the human rights abuses in Sri Lanka as well as descriptions of the landscape.